


Walk A Mile

by Rizobact



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, OC deaths, Other, Self-Insert, Self-insert January 2017, Weirdness, because I sure can't find it now, if that's even a real thing, maybe I just imagined that tumblr post, what even is this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-24
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-09-19 18:26:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9454751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rizobact/pseuds/Rizobact
Summary: You show up in your favorite character’s universe, only for them to be missing. You ask the other characters about it, but they have never even heard of your favorite character. You soon realize that you’re supposed to play their role in the story/series… *looks at favorite character* This is gonnasuck.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I of course have two favorite characters, as I'm sure plenty of people know, but I had to pick one for the purposes of this story. Deciding between Prowl and Jazz wasn’t easy; I doubt I’d be an even remotely adequate replacement for either of them, and both their lives are horrible (but let’s face it, it’s Transformers, everyone’s lives are horrible). So I looked at their jobs: whose was more physical (Jazz) and whose was more mental (Prowl; pun intended), then picked the one closer to what I actually do IRL — Prowl.

_ Floating… I was floating, surrounded by dark, empty nothingness, with no memory of how I’d gotten there. What was going on? It was disorienting, confusing… Was I dreaming? Or was I wa— _

“—aking up? Hello there! Are you back with us?”

Was I? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t recognize the voice of the person talking to me. Maybe I’d recognize their face? 

Opening my eyes didn’t really help; wherever I was, the lights were agonizingly bright. Everything looked… odd. Like someone had messed with the levels in photoshop, skewing the colors and contrast so everything washed out and blurred together. All I could make out were two indistinct blobs moving around beside me, the nearer of which was still speaking.

“How are you feeling?” it asked softly. “Do you know where you are? Can you tell us your name?”

So they didn’t know who I was either.  _ Fantastic. _ But those questions did give me a clue what was going on, at least. While it was a bit surreal to have them directed at  _ me, _ I’d heard those kind of questions dozens, if not  _ hundreds,  _ of times (courtesy of a penchant for medical dramas), and I knew what they meant. Funny, I didn’t remember anything that would have caused me to black out and wind up in a hospital…  

“He’s awake, but I don’t think he’s fully conscious,” the second blob said, effectively snapping me from my thoughts.  _ He???  _ Since when was I a ‘he’?

“I’m conscious,” I tried to tell them. It came out sounding more like “Mm conshuss,” but it succeeded in getting their attention. Both strangely-shaped blobs of overexposed color shifted, the second moving to shine another bright light in my face. “Nnng!” Not helping!

“Responds to light. Maybe he’s having trouble rebooting.”

‘Rebooting’? Maybe I was having trouble  _ hearing.  _ Or — waaaait, of course! I hadn’t really woken up at all! This  _ was  _ a dream. And if I was supposedly rebooting, that meant that in this dream, I was a Transformer.  _ Awesome!  _

…Unless this turned into a bad dream. Getting to be a Transformer was not consolation for a nightmare. Not that I’d be able to do much about it, if that was the case. Even when I knew I was asleep, I didn’t have good control of my dreams.

Leaving the problem, if it was going to be a problem, for later, I tried talking to the blobs again. “Hiii…” Still not easy, but easi _er_. “Who’re you guys?” That was even clearer, clear enough for me to realize something else. Usually I had my own voice in dreams, even if I wasn’t in my own body, but that had sounded like… “I need to sit up.”

“Not just yet,” the first voice said gently, and finally the blobs resolved into coherent shapes. Cybertronian shapes. I was looking at two mechs, both in standard medic red and white with gray accents. I didn’t recognize either of them, but I knew the Autobot insignias on their plating immediately.  _ That’s a relief. _ “We need to check a few things first. Can you tell us your name?”

“My name is—” Obviously I knew my own name, but the voice coming out of my mouth was the same as the one I used in RP for— “Speedtrap.” Glancing down at my body —  _ frame  _ — confirmed it. I couldn’t see much with that bumper in the way, but the black and white plating was right, as was the red emblem on my chest. “My name is Speedtrap, and I’m in a hospital.” I didn’t know where the hospital was, or even  _ when, _ but revealing that would just make them think there was something wrong with my processor, so I waited to see if they would fill me in without having to ask.

“Yes, this is a field hospital. I’m Weld,” the first medic identified himself, “and this is Forge.”  _ Redshirts, in other words. _ I felt bad for the thought as soon as it crossed my mind, and stifled an inappropriate laugh. “What do you remember?”

“Uhh… not much?” I hedged, trying to buy time to make an educated guess. “I don’t know what happened.” A field hospital could mean any number of things, but these mechs were Autobots, and Speedtrap… was Praxian.  _ Oh, no. _ I felt a sudden sense of dread. The most likely event for my brain to have picked to dream about with him in it was—

“The Decepticons happened,” Forge quietly answered the unspoken question, staring blankly at the bank of monitors he was checking beside my berth. “Praxus is gone.”

_ Drat. _

“What do you mean, gone?” I asked unnecessarily. Now that I knew what to look for, I could see signs of stress, fatigue, and shock in both Weld and Forge, and cursed silently that I’d missed them before. “Gone as in,  _ gone,  _ gone?” It was easy enough to feign the shock and disbelief I knew they would be expecting from me. Just because I’d never lived through anything even remotely comparable to the utter annihilation of an entire city didn’t make the atrocity any less horrible to imagine.

Part of me couldn’t help being grateful this dream was happening  _ after  _ the fall, rather than before it. That would have been a nightmare for sure: knowing what was coming, trying futilely to prevent it, then being forced to watch it happen anyway.

“Gone as in, completely.” Weld laid a comforting hand on my arm. It shook slightly, and I wasn’t sure if he meant the gesture more for my benefit, or his. “I’m sorry.”

“I…” What was I supposed to say? What  _ could  _ I say? I didn’t even feel hurt, but it sounded like this hospital was one for the precious few survivors found in the smoldering wreckage of the city. “I don’t remember an attack.”

“There was no warning,” Forge said, still speaking to the wall. “No warning, no chance to fight back, no chance to evacuate. The sky just filled with fire, then began to fall.”

“It started as just a bombing run,” Weld continued, relieving the burden of explanation from his traumatized colleague. “Only it didn’t stop. They kept coming and coming, pass after pass, raining fire, death and destruction. The city crumbled and caught fire.” His voice sounded detached, distant from the events he was relaying. Another sign of shock. “There wasn’t much left for the ground troops to finish off, or the rescuers to find.”

“So… how did I…?” Again I looked down at what I could see of myself. I had a few scrapes here and there, and my paint was a bit dusty, but that was pretty much it. Hardly all I should have had, if I’d been pulled from the rubble of Praxus.

Weld pointed to one of the monitors Forge was still fiddling with. “You suffered a pretty bad helm injury, but otherwise you were really lucky.”  _ Plot armor,  _ my brain supplied helpfully, and I cringed. Not because I wasn’t glad of it, but because I knew it wouldn’t endear me to anyone that I’d gotten off easy. “The recovery team said you were probably knocked out as the building they found you under collapsed on top you, forming a protective pocket around you.”

“Do they need help?” I knew there wouldn’t be many survivors, but I had to make the offer. “The rescuers, I mean. If I’m not hurt, can I help them?”

“You  _ are  _ hurt,” Weld stressed, the comforting hand holding me down turning firm. “I told you, you took a bad knock to the helm. Let us finish making sure you’re alright and won’t collapse again suddenly before you go doing something reckless.” Then he stood, tapping Forge’s arm to get his attention. “I’m going to grab a ration for him. Do you need anything?”

“No.” Forge finally looked away from the monitors and met my optics, his far-away look slipping back behind a mask of professionalism. “I need to finish updating your chart.” He frowned slightly as Weld walked away. “Maybe you can help clear up a problem I’ve encountered.”

“A problem?”  _ Oh, joy.  _ “I’ll do my best.”

“We saw that you’ve taken the Autobrand,” Forge said, pointing to the insignia on his chest and the matching one on mine before picking up a datapad, “but you don’t seem to be in the system.” The display, when he turned it around, read ‘Autobot Speedtrap: no matches found’.

Well. That was a problem, yes. Strange; there  _ should  _ have been a personnel file on Speedtrap — on me — in the Autobot records. “I… don’t know why that would be,” I told him honestly. “I’m an Autobot, same as you.”

“Not according to this, you’re not.” Forge’s frown deepened. “Is there anyone who can vouch for you? Someone who would recognize you who  _ is  _ in the system?”

I couldn’t fault him for wanting,  _ needing,  _ to be careful about spies, but really! A computer glitch was  _ far  _ more likely to be the cause of the confusion than me being a plant, and he ought to know it. “Prowl knows me,” I said, not beating around the bush and going straight for the top. If  _ he  _ wasn’t familiar enough for them to trust, no one would be. “We were on the force together before the war.”

“Prowl?” Weld echoed, returning with a small ration cube, confusion written on his face. “Who’s Prowl?”

“I don’t know.” Forge tapped out Prowl’s name on his datapad: ‘no matches found’. “Someone else who doesn’t exist, apparently.” Both of them turned to look at me questioningly. “Are you sure he’s an Autobot?”

“Prowl doesn’t exist?” The hovering sense of dread settled deeper in my chest. “But…” If Praxus had just been destroyed, then Prowl should have already made a name for himself.  _ Everyone  _ should know who he was! “Wait, so, if Prowl doesn’t exist, who’s running this war?” Assuming the war was still a thing, which Decepticons razing cities to the ground was a pretty good indicator of. Prowl was  _ pivotal,  _ for all that he wasn’t popular. He hadn’t been exaggerating when he called himself the architect of the war in the comics. “All Optimus and Megatron are capable of doing is perpetuating a conflict we’re all on the same side of while everything goes to hell in a handbasket!” 

The looks on their faces said it all: yes, Optimus and Megatron were in charge, yes, they were leading their followers against each other while the world collapsed on itself like the building that had apparently saved my life, and yes, that building had done serious damage to my processor.

“We’re losing, aren’t we? The Autobots, I mean,” I continued to babble, unable to stop myself even though I knew I wasn’t helping my case. “There isn’t another tactician even close to Prowl’s caliber on our side. Without him we’re all just heading full-steam ahead for the light at the end of the tunnel, only it’s the oncoming Astrotrain.”

Weld and Forge exchanged a significant glance with each other. “I’m… going to call a specialist,” Forge said, trying to sound unconcerned and failing miserably.

“Good idea,” Weld agreed with a nervous smile. “I’ll stay here with the patient.”

I ignored them both. They weren’t important. I might not be able to change my dreams from the inside, but there was always one surefire way  _ out _ of them. All I needed to do was focus and wake myself up — because a war without Prowl sure sounded like a nightmare to me.

Forge slipped out of sight, leaving me alone with Weld. “Shh, everything’s alright,” he said soothingly. He seemed more afraid  _ for  _ me than  _ of  _ me, even if he thought I was talking crazy. “Everything’s fine.”

“Fine?”  _ Wake up, wake up… _ “The entire city of Praxus just got blown up, and you’re telling me that one of the most important mechs in the history of the planet, the one responsible for preventing the same thing from happening somewhere else,  _ everywhere else,  _ straight up doesn’t exist!”  _ …wake up, wake up…  _ “That doesn’t sound fine to me!”  _ Wake up! _

…It wasn’t working. Why wasn’t it working?!

“Don’t worry,” Weld said, sensing my distress but mistaking its cause. “You’re just disoriented, it’s perfectly normal to be confused about your memories after an injury like yours.”

“I’m not confused!” Well, I was, but only because every time I reopened my eyes, I was still here on this medical berth instead of in my own room! I tried throwing myself to the floor, hoping the fall would pitch me out of bed for real and snap me out of the dream. 

“Please! Calm down!”  _ WAKE UP!!! _ “Everything’s going to be alright.”

Alright?  _ I couldn’t wake up!  _ That was very much not-alright! “You’re  _ sure  _ you’ve never heard of Prowl?” I asked, pleading as Weld somehow locked my frame against the berth.  _ Magnets.  _ “He was a mechaforensics specialist in Iacon when Senator Sherma was killed. He was in the Autobot Security Services in Kaon under Sentinel Prime, and fought alongside Orion Pax against Zeta in Nyon! How can you not know who he is?”

“Just try to relax, okay?”  _ Not playing into my delusions. _ I could feel fingers on my arm — Weld, seeking out a medical port to sedate me — and started to flinch away, then stopped. Maybe I should let him do it; maybe if I fell asleep here, I would wake up back in reality. It certainly worked that way the (blessedly) few times I had died in my dreams. 

A slight pinching sensation told me he’d managed to get the port open, and there was the strangest electric sensation as he plugged in. “Optimus Prime has fine generals at his side. You can’t ask for better mechs than Ultra Magnus and Ironhide.”

“Oh, sure, they’re great.” And they were, both of them, but— “But they’re not the  _ best.” _ My body suddenly felt heavy, like an invisible lead blanket had been laid over me. A second later my vision started to blur again, and my thoughts with it. “Prime listens… to a point. Then… gets restless… changes tack on a whim.” And neither Ironhide nor Ultra Magnus was as able, or as willing, as Prowl to work  _ against  _ Optimus when the Prime was bound and determined to be an idiot.

Of course, as Prowl had said, the average Autobot default setting was daredevil maverick. Unless the person with the idea happened to be surfing on a meteoroid, they generally didn’t get paid much attention. But Prowl kept trying, past the point where any lesser mech would have just flipped his table, gotten up, and left them all to burn; even through everything that happened to him after the ‘end’ of the war… He deserved so much better than he’d gotten for all that he’d done, but he hadn’t let any of it break him. Instead he just kept fighting, no matter what the cost to himself.

I admired that strength. 

The Autobots  _ needed  _ that strength. The were doomed without it, and they didn’t even know it.

“Someone… has… to…” My optics flickered as my vocalizer shut down, darkness returning to carry me away.

“Shh. Rest now. Things will be better when you wake up.”

***

NOISE _ LIGHT _ **_FIRE_ ** _ PAIN!!! _

“AhhHHH!!” 

This time I didn’t wake up gradually; instead, I was abruptly ripped from slumber as I was thrown to the floor and nearly crushed by the heavy metal slab I had been laying on when it followed me to the ground amidst an assortment of other mechanical debris.  _ Agony  _ lanced down my arm from my shoulder —  _ must have landed on it badly  _ — but I barely heard myself scream over the cacophony around me.

Ohhh, this was definitely  _ not  _ better! Blinking my eyes —  _ optics _ — I saw that yes, I was still Cybertronian (if considerably more scored and scorched than I had been before), and that I was still in the same room (now much more exploded and on fire) where I had spoken to Weld and Forge. In fact, that twisted wreck of metal in the corner looked a bit like—

Reflexively I jerked my helm to the side, sending a new bolt of pain from what I now realized was a crushed doorwing down my arm. At least mine was still attached; what was left of Weld’s very much  _ wasn’t…  _ and neither was his head.

There wasn’t time to even curse, let alone question why I still hadn’t woken up in my world. A screaming roar whipped through the air, drawing my attention to the patches of sky visible through the ragged new skylights in the roof. I caught a glimpse of something large and fast moving overhead.

BOOM!!! _ BBBBBOOOOOOOM!!! _

_ Seekers! _

I felt more than heard the bombs detonating all around. Ducking beneath the overturned berth gave me some measure of cover from the firestorm that swept through the room in their wake, but the flames still licked hungrily at me and still  _ hurt,  _ even if my metal body wasn’t flammable.

_ Your body isn’t, but your blood is!  _ Energon  _ is flammable!  _

Wherever the field hospital had been, it was in the middle of an active warzone now, and that meant staying here wasn’t an option. Unless I wanted to die, and hope that I ever woke up again in  _ any  _ world.

_ MOVE! _

Somehow I managed to drag myself to my feet, simultaneously shocked that I was able to move and just plain _ in shock _ as I hauled myself through the ruined hospital. Bodies of mechs I didn’t recognize lay crushed or smoldering, all of them dead and graying. Several times I tripped over trailing lines or sprawling limbs —  _ had that one been Forge, once upon a time?  _ — and just as often threw myself to the ground at the rumbling bang of an explosion or the wailing shriek of fire. 

_ Keep moving. Keep moving.  _

I lost all sense of time, the world around me shrinking down to a hazy bubble filled with a fog of smoke and pain. Each time I fell it was harder and harder to get back up.  _ Away.  _ Why was I still moving again?  _ Have to get away.  _ But I was so tired; it would be so much easier to stop.  _ One more step!  _ Maybe the next time I fell I could just lay down and—

“—ey!! Got a live one over here!”

_ …What? _

Fire still crackled all around, but at some point the roar of seeker engines and falling bombs had stopped and I hadn’t noticed. Now that I did, it was like that noise had been physically holding me up, and without it I staggered, unable to go on. I was falling, falling… 

“—ay with me, y’hear me? Stay with me!”

I hadn’t been aware of my vision fading, but I couldn’t miss the vibrant blue peeling away the darkness around me and coalescing into a familiar face above me. A  _ very  _ familiar face.

“That’s better,” Jazz said with a smile. His arms were around me, supporting me. A tiny, far off corner of my processor thrilled at this, but I couldn’t entirely remember why it should. “I know you’re runnin’ on fumes mech, but I can’t have you fallin’ into stasis.”

“Wh..kkhk… whyy _ yyy _ — why not-t-t?” I forced out past stinging static. “Wh-khk-t-t happ-p-pfffkt!”

“Shh, you don’t have to talk now.” The world spun as Jazz shifted my weight to wave over his shoulder, signalling our location. “Wait till the medics get you fixed up all nice and new, ‘kay?”

_ They have their work cut out for them.  _ I was a wreck and I knew it. From my position in Jazz’s arms, I could see parts of my plating had been burned down to the bare metal in places, and torn away entirely in others. Wow. I looked  _ really  _ awful, now that I let myself think about it. Those wires probably weren’t supposed to be exposed and sparking that way, especially so close to the line next to them slowly dripping thick, dirty fluids onto the ground… 

“It looks worse than it is, really,” Jazz said soothingly in response to my wandering gaze. “I know right now you probably don’t believe me, but  _ believe  _ me. I’ve seen worse.”

_ Seen and had worse, too. _ I knew. And if this really was the same world, the same dream — the dream without Prowl — he’d have worse again. Worse enough someday that there would be no fixing him up all nice and new. Someday that brilliant blue life would be gone.

“Jhx-x-kksssht,” I tried again to speak, only for my voice to be swamped with static once more. I was able to raise my hand though, to reach out and hold on to Jazz. My fingers curled around his arm tightly, clinging desperately like I was the one trying to hold him back from the Well, when it was me bleeding all over us both. 

Was I crazy to assume that would be Jazz’s fate? That he and so many others who might have lived were going to die without Prowl? The perception everyone had of him was that he sent mechs to their deaths and didn’t even care, but that  _ wasn’t true.  _ Prowl’s orders  _ did  _ send mechs to die, yes; that was his job. An unpleasant, miserable, thankless job. But he didn’t  _ not care. _ He did the job  _ because  _ he cared, using lives to save lives in an enormous game of chess where he didn’t have the luxury to think past the number of pieces on the field. He couldn’t afford to think about the names written on the bottoms of the pieces until they fell, reclaiming their identities in death.

Prowl knew the names of the dead. He valued their sacrifices. And if he’d been put in the position of putting the good of the many over the good of the few, how was it his fault when he did just that? Admirable as it was to want to save everyone and consider every single soldier as an individual, it just wasn’t practical. But guess what? War sucks. Want it to stop sucking? Stop fighting.

“—ou alright? Come on, there we go, come back to me.”

Had I gone somewhere?  _ Off into my head, maybe.  _ But it was nice there. It didn’t hurt there… 

“Nonono, you need to live! Don’t you do this, come on! Wake up!” Jazz’s voice above me took on a note of panic as he shook me remarkably gently given the circumstances.  _ “I need you to live!” _

…Jazz… needed  _ me…  _ to live? 

_ “Wake up!” _

Later I realized it was the sheer number of bodies he’d run across before finding me that had made him so desperate for a survivor — any survivor. The thought of finding  _ no  _ survivors was a crushing weight, one that was too heavy for him to bear. He hadn’t meant the words personally; Primus, he didn’t even know me. But I knew him. I knew him, I cared about him, and I didn’t want him to die.

_ Wake up, huh?  _ Well. If I was going to be having this dream for the foreseeable future, then I might as well do something with it. I even had the perfect black and white unregistered Praxian frame for it.

“I-I… m — kkhht! — h-here,” I mumbled, willing my optics to light and bring Jazz’s face back into focus. “I’m… here.”

“Thank Primus!” Relief flooded Jazz’s features and rolled off his plating, gently flowing over mine.  _ His EM field. _ I was actually feeling his EM field. “Don’t you dare try to die on me again, you got it?”

“G-g-g— yes. P-promise.” I could finally hear the footsteps of the others approaching. With any luck one of them would be a medic. The pain was coming and going thanks to the shock, but I still  _ hurt. _ Especially that twisted doorwing.

“Good.” Jazz looked up and rattled something off to the rest of his team too quickly for me to follow with my fuzzy processor, then turned back to me. “I’m Jazz,” he introduced himself as someone connected confidently to the medical port in my arm. A second later they were intruding themselves between me and my pain, sweeping it aside.  _ Thank Primus! _ “Who’re you?”

“…I’m Prowl,” I answered, praying I wasn’t making a mistake. “My name is Prowl.”

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so that ending is really more of a beginning, but it’s where the story ends for now for a number of reasons. Maybe one day there will be more, maybe not, but I figured I would go ahead and post this before the end of the month.
> 
> Thank you any/everyone who read this strange critter! Who do you think I’m more like? Prowl, or Jazz? *is curious*


End file.
